


Monsters

by sivib



Category: Hannibal (TV), Highlander: The Series
Genre: Crossover, Gore, Graphic Description
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 01:44:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1964235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sivib/pseuds/sivib
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why don't you come up (or down) to the lab and see what's on the slab.  I see you shiver with antici..........</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters

Monsters

The wounds were closing even as he incised them.  On the cutting board, the pale man lay dead, but sparks of electricity danced along Hannibal’s knife and through the open cavity of the abdomen.  The heart, exposed and quiescent, flickered as though it contained a thunderstorm.  The man’s lungs, kidneys, and liver had been removed and set aside for later.  They did not flicker so, but steamed gently in the cool basement air.  And still, still the edges of the y-incision, there at the corners where flesh touched flesh, it was sealing.  Tiny sparks danced in those corners, along the edges sparking together.  Curious, Hannibal laid aside his knife and drew away his hands to watch. 

The edges kissed, closing millimeter by millimeter, so slowly he thought he was imagining it.  He reached out and pressed the sundered flesh together.  The lightning flicked like fire and the skin was sealed as though it had never known the knife’s edge.  For a long while, nothing else seemed to happen.  The pale man lay on the cutting board, stripped and washed and bloodied from neck to pubis, but whole.  Hannibal was strangely disappointed when, after five minutes, there were no further changes.  He picked up his knife and  prepared to reopen the cuts and take the heart.

A spark leapt from the flat abdomen to the tip of his knife, and he nearly dropped the instrument.  Placing his hand on the pale man’s skin, he could feel static, flickering waves of power fluttering like trapped birds in an emptied cavern.  He felt a thrill, a chill, as the muscles clenched under his palm, and jumped when, a moment later, the pale man gasped and opened his eyes.

The man struggled against the cuffs which held him to the cutting board, his wide eyes seeking shapes beyond the blinding light which bathed him from the surgical lamps above.  His mouth formed words that died unspoken in breathlessness and confusion.  He arched his back and pulled, a wild and trapped creature, and then subsided, cursing in several languages. 

Hannibal let the pale man fight for a moment longer and then placed his hand over the nose and mouth, silencing the profanity and ending his breath.  The man stilled, eyes wide and his pupils little more than pinpricks in a sea of green and brown.  He saw Hannibal, then, a dark shape in the shadows, and his struggles began anew, growing dark and desperate as the hunger for air overcame his self-constraint.  Delicately, almost gently, Hannibal set his fingertips to the red-smeared carotid and measured the pale man’s life in quickening, fluttering, slowing, stilling heartbeats.  Those remarkable eyes dimmed, the lids not quite closing in death, and the hands relaxed their panicked grasping toward life.

Only a minute passed this time before the pale man on the table groaned and gasped and stirred again.  The struggle was brief this time, a twisting of the wrists and ankles, and then the man turned his strange eyes on his shadowed tormentor.  “Will you please,” he said, “ _please_ not do that again.  It bloody hurts.”  His voice was quiet and hoarse, and he licked fresh blood from his lips.

In the shadows, Hannibal smiled.  “I’m sure it does,” he said.  The man’s insouciance was delicious, almost as much so as his inventive invective.  “Every time.  How many times have you died?”

The pale man slumped bonelessly on the cutting board, his head lolling with fatigue.  His blood had pooled under his head and it was soaking into the dark strands, turning them a rich mahogany.  He yawned hugely and twisted his wrists in their bindings.  “Enough to know how many kinds there are.  None are pleasant. “ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.  “No, I tell a lie.  Death by hypothermia comes the closest.  You just fall asleep in the end.  It’s a bitch getting to that point, though.  I don’t recommend it.”  Then he opened his eyes and looked over at the tray of organs.  “Is that my liver?”

Hannibal watched the gore streaked chest rise and fall with each breath and felt wonder.   It seemed like a dream, like one of Will’s daydreams, with his composition coming back to life under his hands even as he composed it.  He licked a smear of blood from the knife and rolled the copper taste in his mouth, grounding himself.  “Yes,” he answered at last.  “You don’t seem to be missing it much.  Your lungs as well.”

“And my left kidney.  Aren’t you a handy little monster.  I was using those, you know.”  The pale man slumped back and resumed twisting his wrists.  “Are you planning on killing me again?  If not, I’d like a bit of water, please.  I’m parched.”

“It takes three days for a man to die of dehydration,” said Hannibal, smiling a whisper of a smile.  “You will be fine for a few more moments.  You seem remarkably calm considering the situation.”  He turned and busied himself cleaning his tools, setting all well away from the pale man on the table.

“As do you.”  The man on the table rolled his head to peer into the darkness, squinting against the surgical glare.  “What manner of monster are you, I wonder,” he said thoughtfully.  “I’ve known quite a few.  You are not a rapist, or I’d be face down instead of up.  You don’t want money; I can see you have plenty.  You seem only to want my death, and I’ve denied you that.”  He licked dry lips again and rotated his wrists.  “You aren’t afraid of me.  Of what happened.  You’re curious.”  He raised his head, the dark hair sticky with gore, and looked around at what he could see beyond the lights.  He noted the well-organized rack of tools, the band-saw, the chains and hooks.  “I am clearly not your first guest, here.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed.  He considered opening the man again, to see if those organs had grown back.  He wondered what they tasted like, or if they would be poison to him.  If they would re-grow in his stomach and kill him, or if they would simply digest and turn to shit like everyone else.  “You will not be my last, either.”  The pale man was afraid.  Hannibal could see it in the tension of his arms, his face, his shifting eyes, and in the nervous dart of dry tongue on parched lips.  Frightened, yes, but not terrified.  How had he ever mistaken this man for prey?  “This…situation,” and the man on the table quirked a tired smile at that phrasing, “You have found yourself in similar straits before, I think.”  Hannibal washed his hands and then turned to lean against the wall, folding his arms.

Stretched out on the table, the pale man smiled.  His teeth were red with his own life’s blood.  “Oh, little monster,” he said, “I have been the cause.”  His hoarse voice was amused, and Hannibal felt a frisson up his back at the tired surety of that statement. 

The pale man rotated his wrists again, restless, and then yanked both up with a ferocious strength.  Bones snapped, and the man howled as he pulled his hands free and curled up and around his shattered hands.  He sat, panting through his teeth as bone moved under skin and flesh mended with tiny sparks and a whiff of ozone.  “Please,” he said softly, eyes closed and back heaving, “don’t kill me just now.  I’m tired.  It has been a hellishly long day.”

Hannibal stood well away from the table, knife in hand, and watched as the pale man uncuffed his ankles and swung over to sit on the side of the table.  He was weak, his legs nearly buckling as he stood, and he gripped the cutting board for balance until he was sure they would hold him.  Sparing Hannibal only the smallest of glances, the pale man gathered his clothes and pulled them on over his red-streaked skin.  He left off the shoes, padding barefoot over to the sink.  He drank from his cupped hands, cradling the water as one who had once died of thirst and learned to treasure water more than gold.

When he had slaked his thirst, the pale man dried his hands and then leaned against the sink, facing Hannibal.  “So, little monster,” he said, “what now?  Will you try to kill me again, or shall we go our separate ways in peace?”  The pale man waited patiently for an answer, idly picking dried blood out of his hair and flicking it into the basin.

Hannibal considered, then set aside his knife.  He held out his hand, one monster to another.  “Hannibal Lecter.  I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

After a long moment, the pale man took the hand and clasped it.  “Methos.  I wish I could say the same.  May I borrow your shower before I go?  Dried blood itches.”

End

**Author's Note:**

> .....pation.
> 
> Ok, these guys aren't mine, or I'd treat them a lot nicer. I wrote this because there is NO Hannibal/Highlander out there and Methos is the little black dress of fandom. Plus, a monster.


End file.
